AI Creates Photorealistic Portraits of Historical Figures

Dutch photographer and digital artist Bas Uterwijk gives us a glimpse of how historical figures would have looked like through these amazing reconstructions made possible through the use of a neural network. The photo above is the artist’s reconstruction of Nefertiti, the great royal wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten. Nefertiti is one of the newest additions in Uterwijk’s series, alongside figures from the Renaissance, 18th-century Europe, and other time periods.

To create these portraits, Uterwijk uploads numerous references of the person's likeness to the AI applications. Then, he makes small adjustments to the program until he is satisfied with the result. “These ‘Deep Learning' networks are trained with thousands of photographs of human faces and are able to create near-photorealistic people from scratch or fit uploaded faces in a ‘Latent Space' of a total of everything the model has learned,” Uterwijk explains. “I think the human face hasn't changed dramatically over thousands of years and apart from hairstyles and makeup, people that lived long ago probably looked very much like us, but we are used to seeing them in the often distorted styles of ancient art forms that existed long before the invention of photography.”

Uterwijk also bases some of his recreations from paintings and sculptures, like his reconstruction of David (which is based on Michelangelo’s sculpture of the biblical figure).

Neural networks truly are a technological marvel.

(All Images: Bas Uterwijk)

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